Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of Zitron, but the narrative around revenues and profitability around AI labs are quite misleading.
According to the article the total revenue figure in the affidavit is “to date”, so basically 8th or March.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
Could've possibly made a stronger claim, but the affidavit may have been drafted/written before February's numbers were determined, even if those numbers were in by the time it'd been reviewed by their legal team and submitted.
I used to love his stuff. Until he just wouldn’t stop beating this drum so breathlessly. Now I wonder how much I’d suffered Gell-Man amnesia with the other content of his I’d previously enjoyed.
This is… not unrealistic. Plenty of such investors have fallen for clear scams.
What I'm not really fan about is the communication style and the "trust me bro" approach, which is pretty annoying ... but I guess it's because it's easier to make the view counter go up.
The be fair to Zitron he claims that enterprise customers are likely paying up front so it won't continue in future months. But now we're into accrual for the future revenues which further complicates the analysis.
As I understand it: in a sworn affidavit (in federal court no less) the norm is to state the tightest accurate floor. A CFO sitting on $6.7B in recognized revenue writes "exceeding $6 billion" or "approaching $7 billion," not "exceeding $5 billion." That's the basis for the 25–35% overstatement claim. This is about legal/financial language norms. It's not OK to under-represent just the same as it would not be OK to over-represent. But let's pretend this is an unusual circumstance (it's not) and that the understatement was a one time thing (it wasn't either based on past statements). So...
Then you have the speedometer/odometer math. Just December 2025 through early March 2026, at Anthropic's own ARR-implied monthly rates, sums to roughly $4.25B ($750M + $750M + $1.17B + $1.58B). If lifetime revenue is barely "exceeding $5B," that leaves under ~$750M for everything before December 2025. But... Anthropic was already reporting $1B ARR in January 2025. This is the argument and "6.7 > 5" doesn't address it because now we're seeing the CFO play the other side of the coin.
So no matter which way you look at it Anthropic's CFO has lied publicly and in very large numbers. You don't get to spin numbers, especially sworn numbers, in a way that benefits you. The only way that can even remotely work is that you're consistent. This is sloppy and all over the board which implies Anthropic wants to hide something.
If it's "a filing where Anthropic was trying to impress a federal court with its commercial scale", then wouldn't the understatement ("exceeds $5B" rather than "exceeds $6B") be to their detriment?
My assumption would be that the February numbers were not yet in when the CFO was initially writing the affidavit (say, one week before its submission date, if legal review/revisions take some time), which would make "exceeds $5B" the strongest claim that could be safely made.
It makes sense to scrutinise Anthropic’s revenue in the lead up to IPO on those grounds; their AR figure simply isn’t comparable to revenue numbers from other firms.
However it doesn’t make sense to be sensational about this - iirc reporting GAAP revenue is a necessary condition of going public so the chickens will come home to roost one way or another.
The money people are absolutely desperate to make this whole mess work.
Helps to look at source documents. Declarations like this are written to be literally true, but not precise enough to reveal more information than they have to.